andrea altemüller • photography

Africa Amini Alama, Tanzania 2022 

Africa Amini Alama is a charity organisation in Tanzania and has launched a range of projects dedicated to health care, education, social care, tourism, and agriculture. It was founded as a private initiative in 2009 by Dr. Christine Wallner and has been maintained throughout the years with the support of her daughter Dr. Cornelia Wallner-Frisee.

2022 I joined this project as volunteer and photographer for two months and feel very thankful for this wonderful experience. Most of the time I lived with the orphans in the Kindervilla and can hardly put into words how touching this precious time was. 1500 children can attend school for free and get the chance for a profound education. I also got to know through this project the fascinating Maasai culture and could witness the beautiful animals in the national parks. The friendliness of the people, the colors, the overwhelming nature and the laughter of the children are just unforgettable. 

Afrika Amini Alama

Palomino Animal Soul, Colombia 2019 

When I continued with my project Portraits of Artists and Musicians in Colombia I met the beautiful couple Karina and Alejandro in Palomino at the Caribbean Coast. Their project Palomino Animal Soul is a shelter where they provided streetdogs and cats with food, medicine and all their love!!! They organize doggy picnics with tourists and take them and the dogs for long walks by the beach which is lots of fun for the dogs and the tourists! I decided to make a little story about their project and shared lots of beautiful, but also some sad moments, because most of the people don’t care much for the animals. In Palomino there is no vet and so it´s not easy to provide the animals with all the medicine they need and everything is very expensive.

Karina and Alejandro give all their time and love to the animals, but they need financial support to be able to continue. I tried to support them with my pictures, because it´s a wonderful project and I experienced that the animals are living happily all together.

Palomino Animal Soul

School for Life, Thailand 2007/2008

School for Life is an internationally sponsored project in Thailand that provides home and care for children who live in difficult situations. Lots of children have lost their parents during the Tsunami or escaped from situations of brutality and abuse at home. School for Life provides for their basic needs, offers psychosocial and medical care, aims to make the best possible education available to them, and respects their right to a happy childhood.

2007 I joined this project as volunteer and photographer, where I taught the children art, dance, yoga and swimming. Besides I took tons of pictures to support the project. It has been a beautiful experience to see these children laughing after all what they went through. In the art lessons I asked them to paint their dreams and was deeply touched when some children processed their dreams in this way and painted dead corpses in the water. Art and swimming lessons was a possibility to work on their traumas.

All these experiences were very touching and I was very delighted when the School for Life in Chiang Mai invited me the coming year to make a calendar production for their sponsors.

Fazenda Barreiro, Brazil 2000

The Fazenda Barreiro is a cattlefarm situated in Minas Gerais, Brazil. During his lifetime Joaquim Campos Cabral has taken in more than 100 „streetkids“ and given them a family, education, work, and a future. 

Children who never experienced a home learned to assume responsibility through working with horses on the farm. At horseshows all over the country the children had to present themselves, and Joaquim was able to let them gain a feeling of their own worth for the first time in their lives.

This documentary was made in 2000 and has been published in different magazines, like Geo and Nature & Kosmos. The film director Christiane von Schwind discovered the story and produced 3 years later the documentary Joaquims Wilde Reiter for Arte - a sensitive portrait of this extraordinary man and his adorable work. 

To share time with these children and Joaquim and to get to know them a little, has influenced me a lot in my life. I visited Joaquim and his children years after years at the fazenda barreiro. In a way he became like a father to me.